Being Wrong - Kathryn Schulz [171]
“Mistakes may be defined.” James Reason, Human Error (Cambridge University Press, 1990), 9. Notwithstanding some dense prose, Reason does a deft and interesting job of ferreting out the practical applications of the insights of cognitive scientists (most famously Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman) about predictable failures of human cognition—so-called “cognitive illusions.” And he does so while recognizing that, even as such illusions make us err, they also make us swift and often reliable thinkers. See especially Chapter Five, “A Design for a Fallible Machine.”
Iris Murdoch. Murdoch writes: “A portrayal of moral reflection and moral change (degeneration, improvement) is the most important part of any system of ethics.” I first came across this passage in the philosopher Sissela Bok’s book Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life (Vintage, 1999), xxvi.
rhubarb pie. First of all, yes, I really don’t like rhubarb pie. Sorry. Second, some readers might point out that many aesthetic preferences are inextricably tied to differences that run deeper than mere taste—to culture, to class, to background. That’s true, but as I show in Chapter Seven, the same can be said of the vast majority of our “real” beliefs: our ideological convictions, metaphysical assumptions, and interpretation of the facts.
John Updike. Updike’s comment was part of a speech he gave at New York University on May 19, 1987, upon receiving the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award for Fiction. It appears in John Updike, More Matter: Essays and Criticism (Ballantine Books, 2000), 810.
Henri Bergson. The edition I cite here and again in the final chapter appears in Comedy, a volume comprised of Bergson’s “Laughter” and George Meredith’s “Essay on Comedy,” Wylie Sypher, ed. (Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1956). The quotation appears on p. 61.
The psychologist Marc Green. I came across Green’s “Mental Act of God” analogy online, at http://www.expertlaw.com/library/malpractice/medical_error.html#6.
an experience recounted by Sigmund Freud. Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, James Strachey, trans. and ed. (W. W. Norton & Co., 1965), 191 (footnote). Somewhat unconvincingly, given the context, Freud says that the patient was “the most remarkable case I had had in recent years, one which taught me a lesson I am not likely ever to forget.”
Thomas Aquinas. For more on accounts of error by Aquinas, Plato, Locke, and many others, see Keeler—whose work is, to my knowledge, the only survey of philosophical treatments of error.
the gates of the Garden of Eden. For many religious thinkers, the problem of error is simply a subset of the problem of evil. Just as it is notoriously difficult to come up with a morally and theologically satisfying explanation for why an all-knowing, loving God would permit the existence of evil, it is difficult to understand why such a God would permit us to get things wrong, especially when those errors cause harm to us or to others, or lead us away from divine truth. One easy answer is that the fault cannot be God’s and therefore must be ours—which is why many religious thinkers have classified error as a form of sin. Augustine, for instance, spends a long time trying to decide whether all error is evil. In the end he concludes that errors respecting religious matters do count as sins, but that our everyday mistakes do not—or at least, not as serious ones: “to err in these [worldly] matters is not to be considered a sin; or if it is, it is the least and slightest.” (See Keeler, pp. 79–82; the quotation is on p. 81.)
CHAPTER 2 TWO MODELS OF WRONGNESS
“Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things.” This and all the quotations from William James in this chapter are from his “Will To Believe,” a lecture he delivered at the Philosophical Clubs of Yale and Brown Universities in 1896. The page citations here and throughout the